‘Profound Questions About Privacy’ Follow Latest Revelations

Fresh reports about the massive amount of electronic data that the nation’s spy agencies are collecting “raise profound questions about privacy” because of what they say about how such information will be collected in the future, NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston said Friday on Morning Edition.

And Glenn Greenwald, the activist/blogger/journalist who has been breaking stories this week in The Guardian about what the National Security Agency, FBI and other agencies are doing, said on Morning Edition that he believes the National Security Agency hopes to create a “worldwide surveillance net that allows it to monitor what all human beings are doing.”

Meanwhile, as we reported Thursday night, the Obama administration’s director of national intelligence says the intelligence agencies work “within the constraints of the law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.” In a statement, James Clapper added that “the intelligence community is committed to respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all American citizens.”

Obama administration officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have said that the intelligence community’s focus is on the electronic communications of non-U.S. citizens.

On the news of the NSA’s collection of data from the data servers of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other leading U.S. tech companies:

– The companies, as we reported last night, have issued statements saying that they have not given the government direct access to their servers, but that they do comply with legally binding orders to provide some information about customers’ activities.

– NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston said Friday that this is “an early glimpse of how intelligence is going to be collected in the future.” What the spy agencies appear to be doing, she said, is gathering up such data and hanging on to it “in anticipation that it might be useful some day.”

According to The Washington Post, which along with the Guardian broke the news about the collection of data from tech companies, “the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.”

As law enforcement agencies learn to take those reams of information and search them “to find patterns that [they] might otherwise have missed … it’s going to raise profound questions about privacy,” Dina told Morning Edition guest host Linda Wertheimer.